Aviva India: IT, the Change Agent

The Indian insurance market is witnessing phenomenal growth. And, this
massive growth means that most Indian insurance companies are struggling to keep
pace with this growth. Since most companies are spread across the length and
breadth of India, managing data and analyzing it in order to provide insurance
policies suited to the requirements of our customers is a mammoth task.

Technology is an extended capability to capture, store, process, develop,
analyze, reformulate, comprehend and transmit data, events, ideas, knowledge,
and wisdom. And we at Aviva exploit IT as a change agent with an aim to be
adaptive and agile, making the most of opportunity of the current business
environment.

We apply a portfolio framework to IT driven by two key variables: business
criticality and newness or innovation. The new products introduced are designed
differently, so the back office operations differ. The main challenge here is to
offer flexibility and yet offer uniformity in the operational processes. In
order to meet this challenge, we have systems that offer the desired flexibility
in launching customized products and campaigns for specific markets, which help
in accelerating the time-to-market.

With a pan-India presence, Aviva has deployed systems that are developed on
multiple technologies with most scalability and geographical extensibility.
However, some core systems due to inherent technology limitations cannot be
deployed on the Web, which again does lead to inevitable operational issues. To
combat this issue, we have planned our IT infrastructure in such a way that it
meets our business.

Managing Controls

At Aviva, our business reach is spread across cities and towns, controlling
various transactions or processes and catering to the crucial audit needs. And,
our IT system tracks every business process electronically. The added advantage
is that the possibility of manipulation and fraudulent actives are also
minimized considerably.

Innovative Ways

Being an insurance company implies that we have to interact with our
customers on a daily basis for which we have an active online presence for
servicing our customers. Our Web Platform for clients is a comprehensive suite
of services that allows our clients to get latest updates of their policies
which includes fund-switching, redirection, and updating details. It also
provides a current snapshot of relevant policy details for our clients.
Customers can even call at our call centers, where Talisma has been deployed.
Talisma is our CRM as well as contact management application and is a key system
for our call center since all queries and issues are first logged in it, thereby
allowing us to get a single view of all customer interactions.

Even our agents actively use IT for servicing our customers and identifying
right products based on their customer needs. Our agents use Financial Health
Check (FHC) to give a complete picture of a persons financial health.

Abhay Johorey

The author is director, Aviva India

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in